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On July 7th, Reddit announced the launch of its own NFT project called Collectible Avatars. Built and backed by the Polygon blockchain and available at a fixed fiat price, this was Reddit's first attempt at NFTs.
And boy, oh boy, has it been a success.
Since its launch, Collectible Avatars have sold a total of $7.59M. On October 24th, they had a volume of 2.54M; on October 25th, the volume dropped to 1.58M. Still, $4.12M in volume in two days represents 54.28% of their total cumulative volume.
Are Reddit's Collectible Avatars the boom the market needs, or will they be a fad?
What are Reddit's Collectible Avatars?
Let's start with the obvious: Despite the downturn, the NFT market is huge. Many social networks have flirted with the idea of NFTs, but none attacked as head-on as Reddit.
Back in June, Reddit published a report called The ABCs of NFTs. This playbook stated that 70% of its users would invest in NFTs from their favorite brands. But let's be wary: a third of its users also thought that brands could also ruin the future of NFTs.
So, how could a brand like Reddit benefit from NFTs while avoiding all the negativity around them? Easily: they didn't call them NFTs.
They announced they would launch Collectible Avatars on the Polygon blockchain. Each Avatar is inspired by Reddit's mascot, Snoo, and prices initially range from $10 to $100.
Likewise, each artist will receive a payment for each collectible Avatar sold. Users would also have the rights and licenses to use the art on and off Reddit.
NFT holders and Reddit users look for community and a sense of belonging. While many didn't understand it, Reddit and NFTs have more in common than meets the eye. They were a match made in heaven.
Reddit also tackled the objection of having to understand cryptocurrencies. Its users could buy directly with fiat currencies at a fixed price.
With over 430M active users, converting a tiny percentage meant success.
And that's what happened.
The numbers behind Collectible Avatars
Despite the opinion of many NFT detractors, Collectible Avatars have been a hit.
Reddit's Collectible Avatar collections are on OpenSea's top 10 list for the 24-hour trading volume. Reddit's various collections currently occupy six positions in Polygon NFTs' top 10.
In these short months of life, Collectible Avatars have accumulated $7.59M in volume. Likewise, a total of 26,274 sales have occurred.
Among those sales, two of them get quite a bit of attention. The first was the Spooky Season collection. One user bought the NFT Midas Touch #1, based on the story of King Midas turning everything into gold, for 18 ETH. While the original holder will have paid about $100 for this NFT on October 20th, someone else bought it for about $27,000 4 days later.
The other big sale to comment on comes from The Senses collection — one of the first collections in the project. On October 24th, a user bought NFT The Hands #1, which features a spooky Smoo surrounded by hands. The buy price was 30 ETH ($45,000). The user intends to sell The Hands #1 for 100 ETH; however, the current best bid is 1,052 ETH.
The current question is whether these avatars' prices and popularity will hold up or take a nosedive. The truth is that the popularity of NFTs has fallen with the market. Is it a matter of time before people lose interest in avatars? Hard to say. But the fact that 3M users have created Vault wallets, the Reddit wallet, in the last few months shows active interest.
Maybe this is what the market needed — a social media going this heavy on NFTs. Only time will tell if Collectible Avatars will reignite the markets as a whole.
